It's not 'so-called' high culture: it is high culture. And Robert Hughes, though possessed of a very readable and beautiful writing style and full of insight, was as plain-speaking and decidedly unsnotty as art critics got, quite befitting his Australian background. You'd know this were Fox News or some such other network to run a piece on him.

Fellas, this thread is about Robert Hughes, who passed away, and is mourned by all those who actually do have an appreciation of high culture. It is not about the presence of or lack of any culture in Kentucky, or whatever.

RIP Robert Hughes. A straight-talking art critic with a great writing style.

Fellas, this thread is about Robert Hughes, who passed away, and is mourned by all those who actually do have an appreciation of high culture. It is not about the presence of or lack of any culture in Kentucky, or whatever.

RIP Robert Hughes. A straight-talking art critic with a great writing style.

No art critic has had a greater impact on how we look at and think about art. In his 1986 history of the colonisation of Australia, " The Fatal Shore" he changed irrevocably how that nation saw itself and how the rest of the world saw it.

As both a historian and art historian, Hughes inhabited that rare space where genuine scholarship and popular appeal co-exist. With perfect and virtuoso prose he called a spade a spade, bad painting bad art, and would have called a pile of plastic masquerading as "installation art" what some small or larger part knows it to be - postmodern rubbish.

Try reading " The Shock of the New". Hughes starts with Cezanne and makes his way to the post-modern wasteland in which the art of today has its feet firmly planted. It is still relevant today - both brutal but delicate. Hughes destroys artists (Warhol among them) and lifts others up (Picasso is rightly hero-worshipped).